Hannah, great article. I think you have done an excellent job of explaining how challenging it is for brands to drive traffic and revenue directly. I have no doubt this is why one of the fastest growing segments of social marketing is influencer partnerships.
Talent — including sports, music, entertainment, models, fitness experts, nutritionists, and fashionistas are now the new media power publishers.

Based on the current trajectory, there will be around 14.5 million sponsored posts in 2017. At this growth rate, it will hit 32.3 million by 2019.

60% of Instagrammers, for example, say they learn about products and services on the app, 70%+ of people say they take actions such as visiting sites, searching or telling a friend after being influenced by Instagram, and 48% of brands say they are anticipating an increase in budget spend on influencer marketing in 2017.

Instagram, Snapchat and even Amazon are investing in tools to make paid partnerships more efficient and transparent with a slew of new features rolled out on all of these platforms in the past few months.

Traditional above-the-line marketing and advertising has been a slow boiling frog for many years, and brands are struggling to fight algorithms that penalize them.

Tastemakers with integrity hold the power — social media superstars who have audiences with high engagement, tell authentic stories and can find a way to infuse partnerships with brands and causes they love and get paid for it.

With Instagram Stories, for example, more influencer led branded content can be posted without polluting the feed because of the ephemeral nature of the content. Add ‘swipe to link’ (which has rolled out in the past couple of months to non-verified accounts) and you have a way to direct traffic from a video story to drive traffic and revenue. That’s over 270M daily active users and a new QVC. Snapchat now allows direct linking in all of their snaps for all users regardless of status.

It shows how important these new media power players are to brands and the platforms that give them their voice.